If you’ve ever made titles in Media Composer it’s probably safe to assume two things: You’ve been frustrated by Title Tool and baffled by Marquee.

Avid Title Tool from 1994

The Avid Title Tool is simple and efficient, it works pretty well and is surprisingly useful, but it’s also very limited. If you ever stumble across a manual from a very early version of Media Composer you’ll probably not be surprised to see that the Title Tool looks reasonably familiar.

To combat this limitation Avid introduced Marquee in the early 2000’s (initially in Avid DS, then in Media Composer on Windows and later also on the Mac) – while some people insist that Marquee is a powerful and versatile tool (it is), most people complain that it’s confusing and unintuitive (it is). In practice this means there’s a few people who manage amazing things with Marquee, while most people swear whenever they accidentally launch it.

Suffice to say titles have been something of a weak point in within Media Composer. People either make do with the Title Tool (entirely possible in many cases) or use a more versatile and general purpose tool like After Effects.

This has always struck me as a little disappointing given that Avid also offer some amazingly powerful titling tools in their Avid Deko and Avid Motion Graphics products. They even have a plugin version of Deko called Postdeko (it’s very pricey).

Clearly Avid have seen the need for a more flexible titling option and they’ve struck a deal with NewBlueFX to include their powerful and intuitive Titler Pro with Media Composer 7. It’s a GPU-accelrated WYSIWYG titling application that runs as an AVX plugin from within Media Composer. It has animation, lighting, textures and 3D functionality (among other things).

But there’s a catch (don’t worry, it’s not a huge one) – Media Composer 7 ships with version 1.0 of Titler Pro, but the latest version from NewBlueFX is 2.0 and the new version adds a bunch of great new features (better 3D extrusion contol, animated textures and improved lighting).

Fear not, however, the 1.0 version that ships with Media Composer 7 is still very functional and intuitive. And, as the proud owner of a copy of Titler Pro 1.0, you’re entitled to upgrade pricing if you want the newer version – a mere US$100.